rwbyfandomcom-20200222-history
Talk:Carmine Esclados/@comment-25936766-20190701230014/@comment-35434444-20190817111809
@EmBELLEm Raymond McNeil would certainly be very grateful if RT decided to emulate his suggestion on this matter, but I've always thought of that as sidestepping the problem rather than actually fixing it. Altering the cosmetics of a semblance and them treating it as a different ability exhibits all the ingenuity of a palette swap in a videogame; a move made for cost efficency rather than creativity. Using it carries the tacit submission that it isn't possible to give each huntsman a truly unique semblance. Why not? Superman possesses supernatural strength. He has many other powers besides, but this is among his most defining. The same goes for the Incredible Hulk and yet no one would ever mistake the two. One is an expression of Clarke's unique heritage and the other represents a fracture in Banner's psyche. The same power is given a very different aesthetic and significance. Variation can be achieved through very simple means. Antman has the ability to alter his own size and this served as the inspiration for Mount Lady in My Hero Academia, but the power of the latter is distinguished by her quirk only allowing her to alternate between two specific scales; her normal human height of 162cm and exactly 2062cm tall. This limitation makes her powers somewhat less convenient and augments her role as a comic relief character. With enough care and attention, any power can be given its own flavour in this way; enriching the character, the setting, and the theming the story all at the same time. Just off the top of my head, you could very easily differentiate Glynda's telekinisis from Camine's and expand their character's at the same time by making it that Glynda has to use gestures and incantations to manipulate objects while what Carmine can do with her semblance varies based on what fashion she's wearing. This maps out a very clear path for character progression: the more rituals and incantations Glynda learns, the more versatile and precise her telekinesis becomes. The better Camine develops her fashion taste, the stronger the effects she can produce. It would be no great disaster for semblances to not be unique and I did just that purely to make a point when I was doing my own rewrite, so I don't understand all this dithering that seems so reluctant to take things too far in one direction or the other when it's needlessly complicated and doesn't serve any benefit. The only argument I can think of in favour of this half-way-house method is that it makes semblances easier to balance by allowing them to be functionally equivalent whist at the same time providing a pretext for making them unique. One I find the be very faint and lazy. ---- My bottom line is, if you want them to be unique, actually make them unique. There are situations where all the creative possibilities within a setting can be exhausted (like how comic books sometimes grasp so far at straws they create things like Snowflame; a supervillain who derives his powers from cocaine) but RWBY hasn't come anywhere near that despite it's seizure-inducing panorama of concepts. If you don't want them to be unique, come out and say it. Don't make palette swaps and then ''pretend ''that each semblance is unique.